His Own Private Idaho

Jay Shaw showed up at Dale Sherard’s place for the last time on the first Monday in February, in the middle of the afternoon and unannounced. He’d come to make sure Dale’s computer still worked, which, a lot of the time, it didn’t. Dale would poke a wrong button and the screen would freeze up, and then he’d have to call Jay to fix it. He liked Jay. Despite his personality, Dale would tease. Even after ten years in Marsing, Idaho, Jay still didn’t quite fit: He was a transplant from the East Coast, and sometimes the remnants of his big-city swagger, cocky and abrasive, got the best of him. But he fid Dale’s computer for free, and did the same for anyone else who asked. That’s what neighbors do in Marsing, help each other when they can. Jay was a good neighbor.

Marsing is a fleck of a town, population 1,031, on the Snake River an hour west of Boise. There are no stoplights in Marsing, no movie theaters or shopping centers, but there is an enormous sky, a view all the way to the Owyhee foothills, and thousands and thousands of cows. If one doesn’t ranch or farm, it’s a fine place to be a retired trucker, like Dale.

Jay had a dozen head of cattle on twelve acres next to Dale’s property, but he was not a rancher of any substance. Nor was he a farmer, though he did grow his own tomatoes and peppers. And he wasn’t retired, either, considering he was still in his early forties.

Jay managed the local irrigation association, keeping the pumps running, patching pipes, and making sure the bills got paid so that thirty-five families had water for their fields. But that was basically a volunteer job. Dale didn’t know what Jay did for a living. No one did. Sometimes Jay told people he was a freelance graphic designer, but as far as Dale could tell, he either didn’t make much at it or he was just cheap. Gut-shot tight with a nickel, Dale says. He haggled over hay for his cattle, wore the tires on his Saturn down to the cords, and ran out of gas often enough that Dale lost count of how many times he had to pick him up on the side of the road. Then again, Jay came to get him when the fuel pump in Dale’s truck blew out at Givens Hot Springs, so it all evened out.

Mostly, Jay looked after his kids. Or had, anyway, until Cara left and took the boy and the girl with her last summer. Cara was Jay’s wife or girlfriend, though Dale never knew which, and it wasn’t his business to ask. She’d worked as a bookkeeper at one of the orchards across the river while Jay stayed home with the children. He seemed like a good dad, too. Mister Mom, everyone called him. "Having kids is the greatest part of my life," Jay says now. "I wouldn’t trade it for anything."

When they were babies, he laundered the diapers and hung them to dry. As they got older he taught them how to read and to count and took them fishing in his little aluminum boat and showed them how to feed a newborn calf from a bottle. He got them ready for school in the morning and took them to the Whitehouse drive-through for hamburgers in the afternoon, and the boy followed him, close as a shadow, while Jay did his chores. Never saw him raise a hand to those kids, Dale says. More of a mother to those kids than their mother. It’d just about killed Jay when they left, and it was still all he could talk about, five months later—how much he missed the kids and how horrible he thought Cara was. How he had to get them back, and that was all that really mattered. So even though he said he came to check on the computer, Dale knew Jay really just wanted someone who would listen to him for a while.

Which Dale did for more than an hour. Then Jay got up, said he needed some hay and that he was going to see if he could get some from Bob Briggs, who farmed 500 acres on the other side of Hogg Road. He drove the Saturn out of Dale’s drive and down Hogg to where a side road wanders up into the Whispering Heights subdivision. Bob, who was out in his pickup checking his irrigation lines, saw Jay park on a patch of dirt, get out, and wave him over.

Bob wasn’t particularly fond of Jay. It’s not that he disliked him, exactly. He just thought Jay was...odd. A city boy playing rancher, so far as Bob knew, because Jay told him he’d grown up in New York. He asked a lot of dumb questions. You’d give him good advice, and then he’d ignore it, Bob says. I thought everyone in New York was like him. And I was glad I didn’t live in New York. On the other hand, Bob thought Jay was doing better in Marsing than he’d do in a big city out east.

Bob pulled to the edge of the road and rolled down his window. Jay asked about buying some hay, which he’d done once or twice before. But not very much, Bob says. And he didn’t want to pay too much. And it was chaff.

As they talked, a blue pickup rolled by. Jay watched as it continued north toward Cemetery Road.

"That’s a cop," Jay said.

Bob scoffed. That was a beautiful truck, a three-quarter-ton Chevy, new. "That ain’t no cop," he said. "I seen that pickup buying hay just like you."

The Chevy made a U at Cemetery, turned around, and started back up Hogg. A white sedan was now following it. As the pickup got closer, another white sedan appeared from the west, out of Whispering Heights. Blue lights flashed from all three dashboards, the truck and the sedans accelerating, then skidding to a stop next to Bob and Jay, boxing them in.

Six federal agents got out, eyeballed Jay.

"Are you Jay Shaw?" one of them asked.

Jay didn’t resist as he was handcuffed and placed in the backseat of a car.

Bob stayed in his truck, watching more commotion than Hogg Road had probably ever seen. An agent checked his ID and seemed to take an awfully long time to believe Bob was just an old farmer. Once that was settled, Bob asked one of the agents what Jay had done wrong. The agent said he couldn’t tell him. Then Bob had one more question. "How’d he know that you were cops?"

For sixteen years, Enrico Ponzo eluded the feds and survived a Mafia hit list. Here are some of the aliases that kept him alive.

Anthony Carroll (1996-98)

An identity stolen from a deceased 3-year-old; Carroll was born in Missouri but grew up in the South and may have attended the University of South Alabama.

Kenneth Ralph Fidler (1998-2001)

Ponzo’s main alias during his Arizona years, Fidler was a computer technician with Mobile PC Doctors.

Troy T. Thompson (1998)

Montana-born, with a Pennsylvania driver’s license. Ponzo used this identity while briefly enrolled in North Seattle Community College.

Jeffrey John Shaw (2001-11)

Rancher, graphic designer, and recent New York transplant. Ponzo lived and raised his kids as Jay Shaw for a decade.

Roy Richardson had known Jay Shaw from the beginning, when Jay started working on the house on Hogg Road. Jay had paid cash, about $51,000, for the land, which he put in Cara’s name, and he paid cash to have the house built, too, handing stacks of bills to carpenters and roofers and electricians as though he didn’t have a checking account or a credit card. Roy thought about plumbing the place for him, but that would’ve been a big job, at least four grand if he used cheap fixtures and maybe ten if he didn’t. That seemed like an awful lot of paper under the table, which seemed like a good way for Roy to run into trouble he didn’t need. But Roy didn’t ask many questions. Nobody did. Marsing’s good like that.

Roy and Jay stayed friends over the years. Jay would come looking for cheap hay sometimes, and Roy would let him haul away the old, molding bales for next to nothing.

"I know you’re Mafia," Roy would tease him.

"What do you mean?" Jay would say, sometimes with an edge but usually not.

"You don’t work, and you never go anywhere, but you always have money. I know you’re Mafia." Then Roy would laugh while his grandkids chased after Jay so they could listen to the funny way he talked.

It was only a joke, Roy having some fun. Truth is, he didn’t know much at all about Jay.

Jay Shaw—technically, Jeffrey John Shaw, the name on his Arizona driver’s license—apparently did nothing wrong. The problem is, Jay Shaw isn’t Jay Shaw’s real name. It’s Enrico Ponzo. He’s not from New York, but rather Boston. And according to state and federal prosecutors, that guy, Ponzo, did many, many things wrong.

Most seriously, he is accused of trying to kill two men and of conspiring to kill several others. He also allegedly possessed large amounts of cocaine and assaulted a Boston police officer who arrested him for possessing said cocaine, also allegedly.

He is charged, too, with various counts of racketeering and other such federal crimes that get layered into the indictments of reputed mobsters, which Ponzo supposedly was when he was a young man. (He’s pleaded not guilty to everything.)

He grew up in Swampscott, a comfortable seaside town on Boston’s North Shore, but his father managed a restaurant in the city, where Ponzo spent much of his time. The restaurant was in the North End, a traditionally Italian neighborhood that, at the time, was also the headquarters of the local Mafia franchise, an affiliate of the Patriarca family run out of Providence. At some point in the late 1980s (exactly when and why are unclear, but the reasons can fairly be summarized as young and foolish), Ponzo allegedly decided he wanted to be a mobster.

In the narrative assembled by the authorities, Ponzo’s life of crime was both violent and inept, which fits remarkably well with the broader story of organized crime in New England during those years. Raymond Patriarca Sr. had been an old-school Mafia boss, ironfisted and disciplined. But when he died of a heart attack in 1984, control of the family fell to his son, Raymond Jr., who was not so disciplined. Nor was he considered especially bright; he was held in such low esteem that his nickname was the dismissively bland Junior.

So Ponzo began his criminal career (again, allegedly, which is hereby appended to the next several paragraphs) with a decaying organization. In the Mafia hierarchy, a kid like Ponzo would have been an associate, not a made man himself but allied with one—in his case, a renegade capo named Bobby Carrozza, who happened to be staging an insurrection against Junior. On the surface, and maybe in truth, too, it was a routine power grab: Carrozza wanted Junior to open the books—that is, induct new members—who presumably would then be loyal to the man who helped get them made, Carrozza.

The Carrozza faction asked to open the books. Junior refused. They demanded. Junior declined. So to speed negotiations, Carrozza affiliates shot a couple of Junior’s lieutenants.

One target was an underboss named Billy "the Wild Guy" Grasso. He got a bullet in the back of the neck. The second was Francis "Cadillac Frank" Salemme, a Boston soldier who’d been acting as an intermediary between the Carrozza faction and Junior. He was walking toward the front door of an IHOP on a dreary commercial strip in Saugus, Massachusetts, when a rented sedan squealed into the parking lot. Two passengers with guns sprayed bullets in his general direction. Salemme—badly injured, but not fatally wounded—dove for cover as the shooters peeled away.

One of the shooters, according to a federal indictment, was Enrico Ponzo. He was 20 years old.

After that, Ponzo’s rap sheet reads like that of your standard street thug. In 1989 he was picked up on assault and firearms charges, and he was arrested in 1992 for beating a stranger outside a hotel with an ex-con and reputed killer named Billy Herd. In a mug shot from that time, he looks the part, too—meaty faced and scowling under a thick head of dark hair. He was apparently making a name for himself. The Boston Globe reported after the 1992 arrest that Ponzo was "considered by law enforcement to be a Mafia up-and-comer." But being an up-and-comer in that particular criminal organization seldom ends well. The pledge to leave it dead is often literal, and typically not via natural causes. The retirement options as often as not are prison or turning state’s evidence. For all the mumblings of omert&#xE0; and loyalty, people involved in organized crime are by definition criminals, and typically ambitious and opportunistic ones.

Which Ponzo apparently realized in the fall of 1994. He’d had a bad summer, having been arrested in July by Boston police for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, and for assaulting the officer who handcuffed him. A court hearing was scheduled for later in the fall, Ponzo posted his bail, and then he was back on the streets.

It all started to unravel after that. Maybe the old mob insurrection from 1989 reignited, or maybe an entirely new one broke out, or maybe the Boston Mafia by the middle of the 1990s had simply rotted into a dysfunctional menagerie of coked-up, trigger-happy half-wits. Any theory is as good as another. For whatever reasons, though, a lot of people around Ponzo started getting shot.

On September 2, an associate named Mikey Romano Jr. was ecuted near an Everett bar, the Stadium Café, moments after Ponzo and another man left him to change a flat tire. Two weeks later, the owner of the Stadium survived five gunshots on a street in Revere. "It definitely doesn’t seem like a coincidence," one cop told the Globe the day after. It wasn’t: Ponzo and three others were later charged with that shooting, allegedly his second attempted—and failed—hit.

The bloodletting continued through the fall and into the winter of 1994. In late October, a mob enforcer named Joseph Souza was shot dead on an East Boston street corner. Two months later, a 25-year-old associate of Ponzo’s named Paul Strazzulla was found in a burning Oldsmobile in a VFW parking lot in Revere. He was suspected of being a snitch, and dead before the car was torched.

Ponzo was a ghost by then. He missed a November court date on the state drug charges, skipped bail, vanished. Maybe he was running from the law, but probably not. (He had a very good lawyer.) Most likely he was running for his life. A lot of people, in fact, assumed he was dead, because Enrico Ponzo was supposed to be dead. Three years after he fled, a federal grand jury indicted Ponzo and fourteen other men for an enormous assortment of crimes. It is an eighty-seven-page chronology of Boston’s incoherent mob wars of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and Ponzo plays two opposing roles. In it, he is accused of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, and drug trafficking. Yet he appears, first on page 14 and then on 67, under different circumstances. "In or about October, 1994," the indictment reads, "Michael P. Romano, Sr., Anthony Ciampi and Paul A. DeCologero, defendants herein, did knowingly and intentionally combine, conspire, confederate and agree with each other and with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury to murder Enrico M. Ponzo."

True? Maybe, though DeCologero was acquitted in 1999. Still, if there is no honor among thieves—and there isn’t—there is even less among renegade mobsters. Of course Ponzo ran.

Jay Shaw showed up in Marsing in the spring of 2001. "I came in along Sunnyslope, you know that road?" he told me from prison in Massachusetts. That’s the local name for part of Highway 55, which runs parallel to and above the Snake River before it bends down and across the water, the town laid out on the other bank like a stage set. "It looked like a great place to raise kids."

Enrico Ponzo had been dead for more than six years by then. Jay Shaw killed him, which is difficult to do, and then kept him dead, which is even harder. It helped that many of his criminal associates assumed it was physically true. "We thought he was buried out in the desert," says one, who called me from a different prison, and he isn’t far off. After fleeing Boston, Ponzo ended up in Arizona. He later told his new neighbors in Marsing that he studied computers in Phoenix and that he met Cara there in the last half of the ’90s. That is nearly impossible to confirm, however, because Ponzo declines to talk about those years,1 Cara won’t talk at all (at the house where she lives with her parents, her father told me to go away and not come back), and Jeffrey John Shaw left very few public footprints.

Which is, in its own way, impressive. Abandoning one life and adopting a new one requires extreme discipline. The basic mechanics can be studied, however, which Ponzo did intensely: When federal agents searched his house after the arrest, they seized twenty-two books with titles like How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, Counterfeit I.D. Made Easy, and Vanish! (They left behind hundreds of others, including dozens of legal volumes; Ponzo is a voracious reader. He’s one of those people, one friend from Marsing says, he reads something, it just soaks in.) The paperwork is not a serious obstacle for anyone with access to old obituaries and public records. Ponzo, in fact, had his picture on driver’s licenses and other documents from five states under eight names. Before he was Jay Shaw, he lived for a while as Kenneth R. Fidler, who, according to the real Fidler’s obituary, drowned in Colorado in 1970, when he was 5 years old. Ponzo pulled a copy of the boy’s birth certificate on June 3, 1996, which he then used to get a Social Security card, an Arizona learner’s permit, and a driver’s license. He also had his photo on a Glendale Community College student ID in that name and on a badge for a computer company called Mobile PC Doctors, which listed his title as "computer tech." A name can also simply be invented, and corresponding IDs can be forged from black-market blanks. That appears to be the case with Jeffrey John Shaw.

Pretending to be someone else is relatively easy. The difficulty is in becoming someone else. It requires, first, walling off the past, severing ties to everyone and everything, missing a sister’s wedding and a mother’s funeral, shutting it all away. Second, it requires keeping the immediate present and an imagined past simultaneously convincing and amorphous. A fabricated history has to be textured enough to be credible, but not so detailed that it can be checked or contradicted or forgotten.

Cara told people at the orchard where she worked that Jay wanted to live off the grid, which isn’t all that peculiar in rural Idaho and which would explain, among other things, why he put the land in her name and paid cash for the house. He had it built at the back of the lot, which slopes up to a ridge running parallel to Hogg Road. The master bedroom and bath were on the ground floor, windowless and dug into the side of the slope like a bunker. On the main floor, he wrapped a deck around two sides under wide windows that gave him a clear view of Hogg and across the high plain to the Owyhees. He could see anyone coming for miles.

1. In several telephone conversations, Ponzo spoke only about his children and his years in Idaho. Because he is potentially facing decades in federal prison, he wisely declined to discuss any events, alleged or otherwise, that might have occurred before 2001. He also asked that no inferences about his guilt, innocence, or general character be drawn from that caution; none are, nor should be.

Jay was neighborly enough, but an obvious outsider. Jim Briggs, Bob’s son, who lives directly across the road from Jay’s place,invited Jay and Cara over for a barbecue shortly after they moved in, but he didn’t much care for either of them. They were just too...I don’t know, New Yorky is the only way he can explain it.

If anything, Jay was a curiosity. Bodie Clapier, a third-generation Marsing rancher who raises cattle and hay on 800 acres that wrap around Jay’s place, would see him in his field wearing bib overalls and a straw hat, which hadn’t been the fashion since Bodie’s grandpa’s day. It was like Jay was playing a role he’d studied in an antique picture book. He didn’t know anything about ranching or cattle, but he was always willing to help a neighbor anyway. He was annoying, he wanted to help so much, Bodie says.Yeah, Dale says, he wanted to help, but he just didn’t have much ability. He had good livestock, though, a small herd that grew over the years. But they were all slick, which means they were unbranded. Registering a brand involves filing paperwork with the authorities.

If Jay Shaw was a cipher, Cara was a complete mystery. Though she lived on Hogg Road with Jay for nearly ten years, her neighbors and co-workers claim not to know much about her beyond the fact that she is a redhead and taller and heavier than Jay. No, not fat at all, Dale says. Just a big woman. She would wave and say hello, but after all those years living next door, Dale can’t recall a single conversation of any substance. Even their closest friends—Kelly Verceles, an ex-Marine who moved to Marsing in 2005, and Angie, who doesn’t want her last name or her husband’s first in print—don’t seem to have known her well. The most notable things they have to say are that Cara made a terrific cheesecake for Thanksgiving dessert, she knew a lot about guns and ammunition and could load her own cartridges, and she had a swastika tattooed on her right leg, which she later had covered with new ink.2 She’d had a difficult adolescence—though in what way no one seems to know—and apparently left home young. But she didn’t talk about the details. She was real quiet, Angie says. I knew where she worked, and she said something about having a tough time as a child, but that’s really it.

Still, in the spring of 2010, Cara was obviously unhappy. Angie didn’t know why, only that Cara was more withdrawn, almost sullen. Her co-workers noticed it, too. Let’s put it this way, one of her bosses says. If you were fighting with your wife and she went to work, probably some people she worked with would hear about it. Then, on August 15, she got in her car and left Jay. A week later, she came back for the children and moved to her parents’ house in Utah.

"The reason we broke up," Ponzo says, "is I caught her cheating on me. I was like, ’We’re done.’ Once the trust is gone, it’s gone."

To hear him tell it—and to hear his friends tell it, too—their relationship had been strained for years. It was as if they were living separate lives, with Ponzo responsible for all the childcare and the ranching chores. "She’s a very independent person," he says. Mostly, he felt like a single parent, and had since his daughter was only a few months old. "I raised them," he says. "I was the main caregiver, you know? And it wasn’t like she came home and she wanted anything to do with them. It was weird, you know? She wanted her time or whatever."

He’d suspected she was having a cyber affair for months. She would come home from work, go straight to the bedroom, close the door, boot up the computer, and stay there until the kids were in bed. Later, according to friends, he logged into her Facebook account and called up explicit chat logs, and he photographed the screen so he’d have a record. He went so far as to order a kit, marketed as an "infidelity test," that uses chemicals to detect semen on, say, a pair of Cara’s panties he tucked into a plastic bag. He never opened the kit, though. What was the point? By the beginning of August, it was clear Cara was leaving.

Officially, their separation was orderly, even amicable. They’d never married, so the paperwork was minimal. On August 5, Jay filed a deed (which Cara actually had signed years earlier) putting the house and land in his name. Seven days later, they both signed a five-page document—the courts call it a parenting plan agreement—detailing a custody schedule and travel arrangements and medical care. "We respect each parent’s separate role with our child/ren and we support each other as fit and proper parents," it says. "We will give our child/ren permission to love, and be proud of, the other parent." Cara would have physical custody during most of the school year, Jay would have the kids for most holidays, the summer, and some weekends if he stayed in Utah. Once or twice a month Jay was to meet Cara in Burley, Idaho, almost 400 miles round-trip, to pick them up on Friday and take them to Marsing—and then drive another 400 to return them on Sunday.

But Ponzo says he never wanted to sign the parenting plan. "It was under duress," he says. "I didn’t want them to go. But she was like, ’I’m taking them, and if you have anything to say about it, I’m calling the sheriff.’" Whether she was threatening to report Jay Shaw for custodial interference or to turn in Enrico Ponzo, he either doesn’t know or won’t say. "I’m just telling you what she said."

And when the children were gone, Jay Shaw was devastated.

An emotional wreck, Bodie Clapier says.

Went to hell in a handbasket, Bob Briggs says.

Real jagged, says Dale, who saw just how jagged on a clear morning at the end of August. A paving crew had Highway 95 shut down in one direction for more than a mile, which meant anyone trying to get to town had to wait fifteen, maybe twenty minutes at Cemetery Road until a flagger waved him in behind a pilot car. Dale was parked there when Jay rolled up behind him, switched off his engine, and got out of his Saturn. He walked to the side of Dale’s truck, rested an arm against the top of the door, and then melted into tears.

"Cara left," he said. "She took my kids." He was sobbing now. "I’m gonna kill myself. I don’t know what else to do."

As summer retreated into autumn, Jay began to adjust to living alone. He tended his cattle and the irrigation system, and he started getting out more than he had. He’d bring a big bag of popcorn to Val and Vern Cobb’s to watch football, and on Tuesdays he usually made it to a bar in town called Caba’s for the $6 spaghetti dinner. Every so often, he’d drive into Boise with his best friend, Kelly, to watch the Steelheads play hockey, and he might wander over to Mike Ferney’s place to drink beer with whoever else happened to stop by. He tinkered with his computers and studied the law books in his office, where one wall was lined with his kids’ crayon drawings of hearts beneath the words LOVE YOU DAAD printed in careful kindergarten letters. He thought maybe he’d go back to school. We were talking one day, Bodie says, and he said, "Man, I should become a lawyer."

No one really worried Jay would put a bullet in his head, but he was clearly miserable. "That was the best part of my life, having kids," Ponzo says. Before they left with Cara, "we were inseparable." And now there were hundreds of miles and long, endless days between them. So he did the best he could. He drove his appointed round-trips to Burley, and if the weather was warm he’d take the kids over to Val and Vern’s place in Whispering Heights so they could swim in the pool, Jay perched in a chair he’d pull right to the edge. He tried to make sure Bob Briggs got to see them, because the one time he didn’t, Bob gave Jay holy hell about it; he might not have liked Jay all that much, but Bob adored his kids. When he wasn’t with them, Jay talked to his kids either on the phone or over Skype, depending on whether Cara would let them. She started using that as punishment, Kelly says. If his son got in trouble, she’d say, "Now you don’t get to talk to your dad."

And that seemed to happen with greater frequency as the weeks and months passed. The boy had always been a rambunctious child, though there is some dispute as to just how rambunctious. According to an affidavit Cara signed, her son has "aggression problems and troubles abiding by rules authority [sic]" that he "developed...before moving to Utah." Jay, on the other hand, would maintain that the boy’s behavior was the result of his children "suffering emotionally because of their abrupt separation from their father, family, friends, and school in Idaho." None of those friends in Marsing, meanwhile, ever noticed any unusually disruptive behavior.

"It wasn’t working down there," Ponzo says. "He was getting in all kinds of trouble, and that didn’t happen in Idaho."

2. During a search of the house after Ponzo’s arrest, federal agents found a small bust of Hitler, shoulder patches for neo-Nazi groups, and white-supremacist literature. The Boston Herald on June 29 interpreted that to mean Ponzo had "tried to go native as a white supremacist." In addition to slurring almost the entire population of Idaho, that also was incorrect. Ponzo’s lawyer pointed that out in a follow-up story the next day, but he did not say that those materials belonged to Cara, as Ponzo’s friends maintain.

He doesn’t go into any elaborate detail. But his friends in Idaho all tell similar stories about Jay’s son acting up in school in Utah, of angry outbursts, of him making the sort of taunts that were unrealistic and yet wholly alarming coming from a child. Jay’s friends also knew the police had been called to escort the boy home once, apparently after he’d threatened to bring a gun to school and shoot the place up. They knew that doctors had been involved to deal with the boy’s behavior, and they knew that by midautumn, Jay’s 8-year-old son had been put on two different prescription medications.

Jay was infuriated with Cara and panicked for his son. The boy had never needed drugs in Idaho, Jay figured, so why would he need them in Utah? He was convinced the pharmaceuticals had less to do with his son than with Cara. He’d always considered her a part-time parent at best, and one who was easily frustrated, unable or unwilling to tolerate an active child. He was really upset by the medications, Angie says. He felt she just wanted to dope him up like a zombie.

He was certain his kids were unraveling in Utah, especially his son. By late autumn, rescuing his children was all Jay could talk about. He would pace Angie’s place, smoking Marlboros, a habit he’d just picked up again. "What do you think I should do?" he’d ask her, over and over. "What should I do? Tell me."

"You gotta do what you think is best," Angie told him. "I know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kids."

Jay Shaw decided to sue Cara for custody.

Jay Shaw, a flesh-and-blood person but a legal fiction, decided to walk into an Owyhee County courthouse, pay an $88 filing fee, and swear out a complaint against the mother of his children.

Jay Shaw, who was a free man only because he’d buried Enrico Ponzo more than sixteen years before, decided to ask a court of law to pass judgment on his fitness to be a parent.

He was risking everything.

As custody disputes go, it was relatively brief—Jay filed his complaint on December 1, and it was over ten weeks later—and relatively civil, if only because there was so little time to get truly nasty. On January 11, Jay filed his affidavit, in which he said his children were "suffering emotionally" and that they had been "summarily taken to Utah by their mother...upon her unilateral decision." Two weeks later, Cara responded with her own affidavit, in which she said that Jay "has been a heavy drinker for many years" and that "his aggression was growing towards me so much that I was fearful for my life." (For what it’s worth, none of his friends consider him much of a drinker.)

That was it for the accusations. At the beginning of February, Val Cobb—Grandma Val to Jay’s kids, whose pictures are on her refrigerator—planned to testify as a character witness, but the hearing was canceled. A few nights later, on Saturday, February 5, Jay was at Ferney’s place, chain-smoking and stalking the yard with his cell phone pressed against his head, Cara on the line. Ferney knew Jay’s case was a loser. "No judge gives the kids to an unemployed father unless the mother’s a prostitute or a drug addict and probably both," he’d told Jay. "Especially an Idaho judge." Still, if Jay was going to try, he was better off being civil about it, not doing anything overtly hostile. "Be nice," he told Jay when he got on the phone. "Don’t piss her off."

The call started fine, from what Ferney could hear, Jay’s voice calm and low. But then it got louder, and Ferney heard a fuck you and a motherfucker and another fuck you, and then the clatter of Jay’s phone skittering across the dirt. Jay was red-faced, panting, when he came back inside.

"Jay," Ferney said, "you just cut your own throat."

Forty-eight hours later, Jay Shaw was arrested on Hogg Road.

That afternoon, Enrico Ponzo was booked into the local jail on a federal detainer.

"I’ll tell you what happened," Vern Cobb was saying one day last spring, after Enrico Ponzo had been shipped back to Massachusetts to face a sprawling federal indictment and, potentially, decades in prison. "I think Jay thought more about getting those kids back than he did about his past."

He still calls him Jay, as do most people in Marsing, even after they’ve seen his mug shot on the FBI’s aging wanted poster and they’ve read about all the things he allegedly did, as Enrico Ponzo, long ago. It is a consensus opinion among them that Jay is in prison because he was genuinely, desperately worried about his kids. They do not believe that a fugitive mobster got cocky and sloppy in a custody dispute, because they do not believe that Jay Shaw is the same person he was when his name was Enrico Ponzo. They believe, in fact, that Jay Shaw and Enrico Ponzo may as well be entirely separate people, real and distinct individuals, one of whom exists only as a memory in newspaper clippings and criminal indictments.

That could be a testament to Ponzo’s criminal cunning, his ability to shape-shift and bluff and con.

Or it could be true.

"You know what they seized from my house, right?" he asks me one day. He means the money, mainly $118,000 in cash plus $65,000 in gold coins, a bar of silver, a diamond ring, thirty-three guns, and tens of thousands of bullets (though he says the guns and the bullets aren’t his). He also means the fake IDs in seven names other than Jeffrey John Shaw and all the books on how to vanish and re-create himself anew. He means that he did not have to end up in jail. "If I didn’t care about my kids," he says, "I would’ve run. But whose life is more important, my life or my son’s? I was trying to save my son’s life."

He says that with no trace of self-pity, and he means it literally. "They called the police on him!" he says. "He’s 8 years old!" A pause. "I didn’t want to see my son in the future," Ponzo says from a corridor in a maximum-security prison, "sitting right here."

He knew the risks, and he knew the odds of those risks. He knew that as soon as he filed his complaint, the courts could figure out who he used to be, or that Cara could turn him in. He does not, for the record, accuse her of doing so, but he does not believe the timing of his arrest is coincidental. Nor does he dispute what two people, Kelly and Angie, say he told them, which was that Cara had threatened to call the feds. "Go ahead," he answered. "I’d rather know my kids behind bars than not at all."

He hasn’t seen them in almost a year now, and he speaks to them only infrequently, when he calls and Cara puts them on the phone. He says it’s a fight every time. He usually loses. "She’s a hateful person," he says. "The problem is, she hates me now." At least he can laugh when he says that. He’s surprisingly cheerful for a man who could remain locked away for the rest of his life, all because he exposed himself, deliberately, with benevolence aforethought.

"Yeah, I’d do it again," he says. "It’s my kids’ life versus my life. His life is more important to me than my life."

Enrico Ponzo is in prison, but it was Jay Shaw who traded his life. One of the first people he called after he was arrested was Bodie Clapier. Ponzo said he was sorry he’d never told him the truth, and he asked Bodie to tell his wife he was sorry, too. "This is a bunch of bullshit," Jay Shaw said, "but I’m going to be here a long time. Will you feed my cows?"

"That’s the guy I am," Ponzo says. "I love that life. Really great people, a great place to raise my kids. And someday I’ll be back. Someday. That’s my hope. Someday, you know?"

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